One of the major differences between Amodei’s and Hagseth’s views is that Hagseth said that in their world they don’t distinguish between “defensive” and “offensive” capabilities.
In other words, a weapons missle defense system is equivalent to an attack one.
I think that applying this thinking to software is a mistake. A lot of commercial software uses open source libraries under the hood, and and while the large corporations might have access to Mythos/Fable/gpt 5.6, the open source library maintainers typically don’t. That leaves them vulnerable to foreign adversaries who do have access to AI models. Attackers don’t need Mythos-level capability then, they just need to outperform whatever the maintainers are using.
Which means that Anthropic’s decision to restrict security research on even Sonnet makes that gap (and thus an attackers opportunity) even larger.
I say this as a coder who wants to release some of my internal libraries to open source. The risk now is that I open up my own products (which use those libraries) to vulnerability scanners while not having those kinds of detection methods myself. This, it’s safer to not release and keep internal than to risk increasing my own attack risk.
Hopefully we will come to see that software is not equivalent to missle defense — writing safe code is different than attacking others’.
For so long American companies have operated under the assumption that servers are cheaper than developers, and that was used to justify all sorts of inefficient practices.
The last year has shown that’s not true anymore (even for web servers).
Meta and I assume OpenAI and Anthropic did everything they could to acquire data, even doing so illegally, such as downloading all of Anna’s archive. Now it’s an open question of whether it’s a societal good or societal bad, but it does show they have little regard for copyright law when it benefits them.
And this whole “they’re 50 steps ahead of you” nonsense is the same kind of stuff we heard from NFT or crypto bros, that we just couldn’t comprehend the infinite wisdom of a post currency world. Sometimes bad arguments are just bad arguments.
Sure they mention diet and exercise in the same way gambling or alcohol ads recommend being “responsible”, or how TikTok talks about their automatic screen limiting time functionality, which they love to promote but internally know does nothing.
According to empire of ai, they started OpenAI as a nonprofit so they could get people devoted to the mission and wouldn’t have to pay the high SV wages
In other words, a weapons missle defense system is equivalent to an attack one.
I think that applying this thinking to software is a mistake. A lot of commercial software uses open source libraries under the hood, and and while the large corporations might have access to Mythos/Fable/gpt 5.6, the open source library maintainers typically don’t. That leaves them vulnerable to foreign adversaries who do have access to AI models. Attackers don’t need Mythos-level capability then, they just need to outperform whatever the maintainers are using.
Which means that Anthropic’s decision to restrict security research on even Sonnet makes that gap (and thus an attackers opportunity) even larger.
I say this as a coder who wants to release some of my internal libraries to open source. The risk now is that I open up my own products (which use those libraries) to vulnerability scanners while not having those kinds of detection methods myself. This, it’s safer to not release and keep internal than to risk increasing my own attack risk.
Hopefully we will come to see that software is not equivalent to missle defense — writing safe code is different than attacking others’.